Aug 23, 2011

Mastercam's OptiRough Toolpath Slashes Roughing Time

Tolland, CT – OptiRough is a new technique designed to remove large amounts of material quickly using its successful dynamic milling motion. Large, aggressive cuts are followed by fast, smaller up-cuts, safely delivering a fully roughed part faster than ever.

Mastercam’s new 3D surface high speed OptiRough toolpath supports cutters capable of machining very large depths of cut.

A single OptiRough toolpath can cut material in two directions: on step-downs (-Z) and step-ups (+Z). This highly efficient, bi-directional cutting strategy removes the maximum amount of material with the minimum of step-downs, significantly reducing cycle times.

Below is a graph comparing traditional roughing vs. OptiRough:

TOOLPATH TYPE ; CUTTERS ; # of TOOLPATHS ; TIME

OptiRough ; 1 ; 1 ; 00:05:17

Roughing Pocket ; 3 ; 3 ; 00:14:53

“The beauty of OptiRough is that you don’t need any special tooling to use it. It simply uses the tools you have now, but in a much more efficient way,” says Gary Hargreaves, VP, Business Development.